Hearing someone discuss the nature of art can easily grow tiresome — indeed, it has, as a subject, become something of a shorthand for the tiresome. But Marcel Duchamp, the French painter, sculptor, conceptual artist, and chess enthusiast, could do it right. He did it by getting straight to the point, a succinctness most famously demonstrated in Fountain, the simple, everyday porcelain urinal he signed and submitted as a work of art for display. The fact that the art world soon put Fountain (and its similar, mass-produced descendants) quite literally on a pedestal makes an observation about art more cleanly than thousands of words on the role of the artist in modern society ever could. But where-whether you paint on a canvas, chisel into a block of stone, or make a purchase at the plumbing store down the street-does this impulse to make art come from? Do artists consciously create their work, acting out creative decisions made within, or do they merely give form to artistic impulses received from… elsewhere? And what do we talk about when we talk about the work of art the artist ultimately produces? Duchamp, concise as ever, addressed the issue in 1957 when he gave the eight-minute lecture "The Creative Act" which you can hear above (or on the full Surrealism Reviewed album available on Spotify below). He identifies one important part of the process as what he calls the "art coefficient." "In the creative act," Duchamp says, "the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle toward the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfaction, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the aesthetic plane. The result of this struggle is a difference between the intention and its realization, a difference which the artist is not aware of." This gap between what the artist "intended to realize and did realize," Duchamp calls the art coefficient, "an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed." But none of it matters, in Duchamp’s thinking, unless someone else actually thinks about the work of art. "No work of art — no balloon dog, no poem mentioning cold-water flats, no four-minute-and-thirty-three-second performance by silent musicians — is a great work until posterity says so," writes the Paris Review‘s Rebecca Bates in a post on the lecture (and a "sort-of Dadaist Mad Libs" recently made out of it). She quotes Duchamp in a 1964 interview with Calvin Tomkins: "The artist produces nothing until the onlooker has said, ‘You have produced something marvelous.’ The onlooker has the last word in it." According to Duchamp’s perceptions, we, as posterity, as the onlookers, have the last word on all work, even Duchamp’s own. So go ahead and yammer a bit about the nature of art; doing so not only keeps the art alive, but made it art in the first place. Related Content: Marcel Duchamp, Chess Enthusiast, Created an Art Deco Chess Set That’s Now Available via 3D Printer Anémic Cinéma: Marcel Duchamp’s Whirling Avant-Garde Film (1926) When Brian Eno & Other Artists Peed in Marcel Duchamp’s Famous Urinal Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Hear Marcel Duchamp Read "The Creative Act," A Short Lecture on What Makes Great Art, Great is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

What kind of delusional self-aggrandizer, called to testify before a United States Senate Subcommittee, uses it as an opportunity to quote the lyrics of a song he’s written… in their entirety!? Sounds like the work of a certain rapper/prospective political candidate or perhaps some daffy buffoon as brought to life by Ben Stiller or Will Ferrell. Only children’s television host Fred Rogers could pull such a stunt and emerge unscathed, nay, even more beloved, as he does above in documentary footage from 1969. Mister Rogers’ impulse to recite What Do You Do With the Mad That You Feel to then-chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, Senator John Pastore, was ultimately an act of service to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its child viewers. Newly elected President Richard Nixon opposed public television, believing that its liberal bent could only undermine his administration. Determined to strike first, he proposed cuts equal to half its $20 million annual operating budget, a measure that would have seriously hobbled the fledgling institution. Mr. Rogers appeared before the Committee armed with a "philosophical statement" that he refrained from reading aloud, not wishing to monopolize ten minutes of the Committee’s time. Instead, he sought Pastore’s promise that he would give it a close read later, speaking so slowly and with such little outward guile, that the tough nut Senator was moved to crack, "Would it make you happy if you did read it?" Rather than taking the bait, Rogers touched on the ways his show’s budget had grown thanks to the public broadcasting model. He also hipped Pastore to the qualitative difference between frenetic kiddie cartoons and the vastly more thoughtful and emotionally healthy content of programming such as his. Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood was a place where such topics as haircuts, sibling relationships, and angry feelings could be discussed in depth. Rogers’ emotional intelligence seems to hypnotize Pastore, whose challenging front was soon dropped in favor of a more respectful line of questioning. By the end of Rogers’ heartfelt, non-musical rendition of What Do You Do… (it’s much peppier in the original), Pastore has goosebumps, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has its 2 mil’ back in the bag. What do you do with the mad that you feel When you feel so mad you could bite? When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong… And nothing you do seems very right? What do you do? Do you punch a bag? Do you pound some clay or some dough? Do you round up friends for a game of tag? Or see how fast you go? It’s great to be able to stop When you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong, And be able to do something else instead And think this song: I can stop when I want to Can stop when I wish. I can stop, stop, stop any time. And what a good feeling to feel like this And know that the feeling is really mine. Know that there’s something deep inside That helps us become what we can. For a girl can be someday a woman And a boy can be someday a man. Related Content: Mr. Rogers Introduces Kids to Experimental Electronic Music by Bruce Haack & Esther Nelson (1968) Mr. Rogers Takes Breakdancing Lessons from a 12-Year-Old (1985) Puppet Making with Jim Henson: A Priceless Primer from 1969 Ayun Halliday’s new play, Fawnbook, debuts as part of the Bad Theater Festival in NYC tomorrow night. Follow her @AyunHalliday Mr. Rogers Goes to Congress and Saves PBS: Heartwarming Video from 1969 is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

In literature, graphic descriptions of menace and dismemberment by monsters are as old as Beowulf and much, much older still, though it wasn’t until Horace Walpole’s 18th century novel The Castle of Otranto inspired the gothic romance novel that horror-qua-horror came into fashion. Without Walpole, and better-known gothic innovators like Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, we’d likely never have had Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, or Stephen King. But nowadays when we think of horror, we usually think of film—and all of its various contemporary subgenres, including creepy psychological twists on good-old-fashion monster movies, like The Babadook. But from whence came the horror film? Was it 1931, a banner horror year in which audiences saw both Boris Karloff in James Whale’s Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning’s Dracula? Certainly classic films by masters of the genre, but they did not originate the horror movie. There is, of course, F.W. Murnau’s terrifying silent Nosferatu from 1922 (and the real life horror of its deceased director’s missing head). And what about German expressionism? "A case can be made," argued Roger Ebert, that Robert Weine’s 1920 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari "was the first true horror film"—a "subjective psychological fantasy" in which "unspeakable horror becomes possible." Perhaps. But even before Weine’s still-effectively-disorienting cinematic work disturbed audiences worldwide, there was Paul Wegener’s first, 1915 version of The Golem, a character, writes Penn State’s Kevin Jack Hagopian, that served as "one of the most significant ancestors to the cinematic Frankenstein of James Whale and Boris Karloff." Even earlier, in 1910, Thomas Edison produced an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s monster story. So how far back do we have to go to find the first horror movie? Almost as far back as the very origins of film, it seems—to 1896, when French special-effects genius Georges Méliès made the three plus minute short above, Le Manoir du Diable (The Manor of the Devil). Méliès, known for his silent sci-fi fantasy A Trip to the Moon—and for the tribute paid to him in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo—used his innovative methods to tell a story, writes Maurice Babbis at Emerson University journal Latent Image, of "a large bat that flies into a room and transforms into Mephistopheles. He then stands over a cauldron and conjures up a girl along with some phantoms and skeletons and witches, but then one of them pulls out a crucifix and the demon disappears." Not much of a story, granted, and it’s not particularly scary, but it is an excellent example of a technique Méliès supposedly discovered that very year. According to Earlycinema.com, In the Autumn of 1896, an event occurred which has since passed into film folklore and changed the way Méliès looked at filmmaking. Whilst filming a simple street scene, Méliès camera jammed and it took him a few seconds to rectify the problem. Thinking no more about the incident, Méliès processed the film and was struck by the effect such a incident had on the scene - objects suddenly appeared, disappeared or were transformed into other objects. Thus was born The Manor of the Devil, technically the first horror film, and one of the first movies—likely the very first—to deliberately use special effects to frighten its viewers. Le Manoir du Diable has been added to our collection, 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Related Content: Martin Scorsese Names the 11 Scariest Horror Films: Kubrick, Hitchcock, Tourneur & More Watch 8 Classic Cult Films for Free: Night of the Living Dead, Plan 9 from Outer Space & More Time Out London Presents The 100 Best Horror Films: Start by Watching Four Horror Classics Free Online Watch 10 Classic German Expressionist Films: From Fritz Lang’s M to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The First Horror Film, George Méliès’ The Manor of the Devil (1896) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

It is one of the most famous experiments in all of science history, but there’s significant doubt about whether it actually took place. Did Galileo drop objects of differing mass from the Leaning Tower of Pisa in 1589 to demonstrate the theories proposed in his unpublished text De motu ("Of Motion")? Rice University’s Galileo Project notes that scholars have long thought Galileo’s references to experiments he conducted "were only rhetorical devices." As PBS’s NOVA writes, "it’s the kind of story that’s easy to imagine, easy to remember, but whether he ever performed the experiment at the tower is debatable." That’s not to say Galileo didn’t test any of his ideas while he taught at the University of Pisa during 1589 and 1592, only that his most famous theory about the effects of gravity on free-falling objects rests mainly on a conceptual thought experiment. In fact, it would have been impossible for Galileo to fully demonstrate his theory because of the effects of air resistance. Subtract the atmosphere, however, and we can easily confirm Galileo’s hypothesis that any two objects, regardless of weight, shape, or material of composition, will fall at exactly the same rate when dropped. One of the most memorable times this experiment did take place was not in Italy or anywhere else on earth, but on the Moon, when astronaut David Scott, commander of the Apollo 15 mission, dropped a geologic hammer and a falcon’s feather at the same time in 1971 (above). As cool as Commander Scott’s experiment is, it’s still not as dramatic as the version of the experiment at the top of the post, conducted at NASA’s Space Power Facility in Ohio in the world’s largest vacuum chamber. A great deal of the drama comes courtesy of physicist Brian Cox, who presents the experiment for BBC Two’s Human Universe, explaining the history and construction of the vacuum chamber, which simulates the conditions of outer space. Then we’ve got the multiple camera angles and dramatic music… typical TV show stuff, effective nonetheless at setting us up for the big drop. Even though we "know how the experiment will end," points out io9, and may have seen it performed before—on the Moon even—this demonstration is something special. First, we get an anticlimactic drop of the objects—a bowling ball and a feather—while the chamber is still full of air. As expected, the ball plummets, the feathers gently drift. Then, in a sequence right out of a sci-fi film, engineers seal off the enormous chamber, and the three-hour removal of air is telescoped into a few second montage of pushings of buttons and mumblings into intercoms. What happens next will… well, you know the clickbait verbiage. But it certainly surprises Cox and a roomful of NASA engineers. Cox goes on to explain, using Einstein’s theory of general relativity, that the reason the objects fall at the same rate is "because they’re not falling; they’re standing still." The science may be common knowledge, but seeing it in action is indeed pretty mind blowing. Related Content:   An Animated History of Physics Introduces the Discoveries of Galileo, Newton, Maxwell & Einstein Galileo’s Moon Drawings, the First Realistic Depictions of the Moon in History (1609-1610) Bohemian Gravity: String Theory Explored With an A Cappella Version of Bohemian Rhapsody Free Online Physics Courses Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness See Galileo’s Famous Gravity Experiment Performed in the World’s Largest Vacuum Chamber, and on the Moon is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

No matter how casual a relationship you’ve had with 20th-century American poetry, you’ve heard the name Sylvia Plath. Maybe you’ve already dared to experience her dark but compelling literary world, or maybe you just know a few of the basic elements of her life and career: her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, her famously harrowing poetry collection Ariel, her stormy marriage to British poet laureate Ted Hughes, her death by her own hand at the age of thirty. But what better day than today, the 83rd anniversary of Plath’s birth, to get better acquainted with her work? And what better way than to hear that work read in Plath’s own voice? Sure, you could just pick up one of the many yellowed mass-market paperback copies of Ariel you see on bookshelves all across America and plunge in, but you might first consider turning to our archives, which contain a 2013 post in which we featured Plath reading fifteen poems that would appear in the Ariel collection that, published two years after her death ("left sitting on the kitchen table to be found along with her body," noted Josh Jones), would raise her poetic reputation to new heights. You can hear the first part of these readings, recorded in 1962, at the top of this post, and the rest at this original post. We might feel lucky that, in her short life, she left even those performances for posterity, but there’s more: last year, we featured Sylvia Plath reading her poetry, the 1977 record released by pioneering pre-audiobook label Caedmon which contains 23 poems Plath committed to tape as early as 1959. Find all of the readings here. If these two audio collections give you a taste for the poet biographer Carl Rollyson called "the Marilyn Monroe of modern literature," have a listen to Credo Records’ album Sylvia Plath, which offers some material you’ll have heard alongside some you won’t have. Having listened to all this, you’ll hardly associate the adjective "celebratory" with Plath’s work — but that doesn’t mean that, on what would have been her 83rd birthday, poetry-lovers can’t celebrate it. Related Content: Hear Sylvia Plath Read Fifteen Poems From Her Final Collection, Ariel, in 1962 Recording The Art of Sylvia Plath: Revisit Her Sketches, Self-Portraits, Drawings & Illustrated Letters Sylvia Plath Reads Her Poetry: 23 Poems from the Last 6 Years of Her Life Sylvia Plath, Girl Detective Offers a Hilariously Cheery Take on the Poet’s College Years Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Hear Sylvia Plath Read 50+ of Her Dark, Compelling Poems on What Would Be Her 83rd Birthday is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

We all know that toys come alive at night, but what about mid-century vintage paperback covers, such as you might find in the psychology or philosophy sections of a dimly-lit used bookstore? Watching 55 minimalist covers from graphic and motion designer Henning M. Lederer’s 2200 title-strong collection begin to spin, drift, and seethe in the short animation above, I got the impression that they were the ones dictating the terms. Or perhaps Lederer is the vessel through which the intentions of the original designers—Rudolph de Harak and John + Mary Condon to name a few—flow. Covers is not an act of reimagination or crowd-pleasing irreverence, but rather one logical motion, elegantly applied. Habitués of used bookstores may find their usual browsing habits slightly altered by the hypnotic results. Lederer makes no bones about judging books by their covers. Strong graphics, not content, are the primary determining factor as to which titles he acquires. The stately geometrics set in motion here are relics from another age, but the uncluttered abstracts so favored by 60s era publishers are not the only genre to catch his eye. Shame Drifter, Dusky Desire, and Sinsurance are some of the decidedly non-minimalist titles spicing up his collection’s online gallery. After all of those arrows, angles, and spheres, Lederer might have craved animating something with a bit more…personality. Related Content: Free Online Philosophy Courses Artist Animates Famous Book Covers in an Elegant, Understated Way Illustrations for a Chinese Lord of the Rings in a Stunning "Glass Painting Style" Lolita Book Covers: 100+ Designs From 37 Countries (Plus Nabokov’s Favorite Design) 83 Years of Great Gatsby Book Cover Designs: A Photo Gallery 135 Free Philosophy eBooks Free Online Psychology Courses Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her post-digital, pre apocalyptic dark comedy, Fawnbook, is now playing in New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday 55 Covers of Vintage Philosophy, Psychology & Science Books Come to Life in a Short Animation is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Only three days remain until Halloween, the evening on which everyone loves a scary movie. If you watch one yourself this Halloween, why settle for a scary movie when you could watch the world’s scariest movie? Or rather, when you could watch what resulted when one of the most visionary auteurs in cinema history put his mind to crafting the world’s scariest movie: The Shining. Whether or not you think it holds that particular title, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation — or, more accurately, total cinematic re-envisioning — of Stephen King’s novel has, since its initial release in 1980, transcended the realm of the "scary movie" and taken a place in the zeitgeist as something more complex, more iconic, and more persistently haunting. Undead twin girls wanting to play, blood flowing from elevators, a manuscript consisting of a single phrase ceaselessly repeated, "REDRUM" scrawled on a door, a dog-costumed Jazz Age decadent, Jack Nicholson wielding an axe: how did Kubrick and company manage to lodge so permanently into our subconscious these deeply troubling images? Gary Leva’s half-hour documentary View from the Overlook: Crafting the Shining tries to answer that question, bringing in a group of interviewees including Kubrick’s biographers, his colleagues in filmmaking like Sydney Pollack and William Friedkin, and his collaborators like The Shining‘s executive producer Jan Harlan, production designer Roy Walker, and screenwriter Diane Johnson. (Jack Nicholson also makes an insightful and non-scary — or at least less scary — appearance as himself.) View from the Overlook reveals that the visceral impact of The Shining, a formless unease that transforms into sharp-edged horror as the film goes on, came as a result of (and this will surprise no fan of Kubrick’s) hard, deliberate work, from the dismantling and rebuilding of King’s original story, to the construction of the Overlook Hotel out of a mixture of real locations and elaborate sets modeled on real locations, to the use of new kinds of camera rigs (camera operator Garrett Brown having invented the Steadicam, a device this production more than put through its paces), and Kubrick’s infamous, actor-breaking take after take after take. I didn’t know about any of this, of course, when I first saw The Shining, popping in a VHS copy late at night during a junior-high Halloween party. But now I won’t forget it — or anything else about this (quite possibly) scariest movie ever made. View from the Overlook: Crafting The Shining will be added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. via Devour Related Content: The Making of The Shining The Shining and Other Complex Stanley Kubrick Films Recut as Simple Hollywood Movies Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining Reimagined as Wes Anderson and David Lynch Movies Stanley Kubrick’s Annotated Copy of Stephen King’s The Shining Saul Bass’ Rejected Poster Concepts for The Shining (and His Pretty Excellent Signature) The Hedge Maze from The Shining Gets Recreated by Mythbuster’s Adam Savage Room 237: New Documentary Explores Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Those It Obsesses Download & Play The Shining Board Game Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Free Documentary View from the Overlook: Crafting The Shining Looks at How Kubrick Made "the World’s Scariest Movie" is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Edgar Allan Poe created a body of work that will seemingly never go out of style, especially around Halloween time. Not only do his stories and poems still inspire dread in the 21st century, but so also do the many hundreds of Poe retellings and adaptations created in the 166 years since the author’s mysterious death. But, we might ask, after so many film adaptations from so many classic horror actors and directors, whether we need yet another one? You’ll have to make up your own mind, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll watch the trailer above for Lion King and Aladdin animator Raul Garcia’s Poe anthology Extraordinary Tales and answer "Yes!" and "More please!" And you can see more, in the clips below from Garcia’s incredible-looking film, hitting theaters on October 23rd. One reason the new treatment of the five stories Garcia animates seems to work so well is that they draw on the talents of actors and directors who have previously delivered classic Poe retellings. For example, "The Fall of the House of Usher," above, is narrated by the late, great Christopher Lee, who joins horror legend Vincent Price as one of the greatest readers of Poe’s "The Raven." The voice-over is Lee’s last role, and it’s hard to think of a more fitting final act for the venerable horror maven. (Lee was also at the time recording "a heavy-metal-rock-opera based on Charlemagne’s life"—one of many metal albums he recorded.) Garcia has created a unique look for each featurette. For "Usher," he tells Carlos Aguilar at Indiewire, "the idea was for the characters to look as if they were carved out of wood, like if they were figures that belonged to Czech animator Jirí Trnka." Just hearing Lee above intone the phrase "an unexpected sense of insufferable gloom" is enough to convince me I need to see the rest of this film. Just above, we have a clip from a much less famous Poe story, "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," a chilling detective tale about a man mesmerized in articulo mortis—at the moment of death. Narrated by English actor Julian Sands, who has made his own appearances in several horror films, the animation style comes directly out of classic E.C. horror comics like Tales From the Crypt, which drew many an idea from Poe, basing one story "The Living Death!" on "M. Valdemar." The "mauve, yellow and mossy green comic-book panels," writes a New York Times review, "prove that you don’t need fancy technology to achieve a third dimension." You’ll notice the unmistakable visage of Vincent Price in the character of the mesmerist, and you’ll likely know of Price’s own turn as Poe himself in An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe. Price also starred in Roger Corman’s many Poe adaptations—beginning with House of Usher—and Garcia has tapped the legendary Corman’s voice for Extraordinary Tales, as well as contemporary horror director extraordinaire Guillermo Del Toro. And if this weren’t horror royalty enough, Garcia’s animated take on "The Tell-Tale Heart" features none other than Bela Lugosi, in an archival reading of the story the Dracula actor made sometime before his death in 1956. Read more about how Garcia found the Lugosi audio and conceived of Extraordinary Tales in his interview here. Related Content: Watch Vincent Price Turn Into Edgar Allan Poe & Read Four Classic Poe Stories (1970) Download The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Stories as Free eBooks & Audio Books Classics Stories by Edgar Allan Poe Narrated by James Mason in a 1953 Oscar-Nominated Animation & 1958 Decca Album The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s Death: 19 Theories on What Caused the Poet’s Demise 166 Years Ago Today Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness New Film Extraordinary Tales Animates Edgar Poe Stories, with Narrations by Guillermo Del Toro, Christopher Lee & More is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Has the endless distraction of modern life destroyed our ability to sit with the symphonies of Beethoven and Bach? Do we no longer have the attention span to read novels? These are the kinds of questions scholar Alan Jacobs asks in books like The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, and they’re questions he admits—on his blog Text Patterns—may obtain different answers depending on the age of whom you ask. In a post from this past August, Jacobs wrote of his need to counteract social media with "the more peaceable and orderly music of Bach and Mozart and Handel," and pondered the emotional resilience of younger people exposed pretty much daily to videos of real-life violence online. "It occurs to me," he concludes, "maybe Twitter—maybe social media more generally—really is a young person’s thing after all. Intrinsically, not just accidentally." I admit, Jacobs’ post resonated with me because of the difficulty I sometimes have as I get older in disconnecting from the constant stream of horror and triviality on social media—and of getting lost in a good book or a moving piece of music after witnessing spectacle after spectacle online. Perhaps it is a function of age, as Jacobs surmises, and the young are better equipped to bounce right back. Or perhaps our daily exposure to endless conflict has all of our nervous systems frayed raw, leaving us unable to appreciate the "countervailing forces" of music and literature that demands sustained attention. The Spotify Classical Playlist blog seems to suggest as much in quoting Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski’s claim, "people whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet." Substitute "Twitter tsunami" and "24-hour cable news" for "music in trains, airports, lifts" and the point may apply to our current cultural condition. So you may think of the Spotify Classical Playlists of all of Beethoven and all of Bach featured here as exercises in increasing your mental stamina, or as therapeutic "coping mechanisms" as Jacobs writes, to keep "emotional balance." You may think of them as ways to connect fully with composers who lived in a world very different from ours, one that moved much more slowly and demanded much less of our overtaxed senses. Or you can choose not to apply any kind of framework, and simply revel in the fact that thanks to the internet—be it overall a scourge or a boon to human life—you can now enjoy all of the works of Beethoven and Bach, each in chronological order; 250 hours of enthralling classical music, for free. So enjoy. And learn more about how these playlists were compiled at the the Spotify Classical blog. And if you need Spotify software, get it here. Related Content: Hear All of Mozart in a Free 127-Hour Playlist All of Bach Is Putting Videos of 1,080 Bach Performances Online Download the Complete Organ Works of J.S. Bach for Free https://www.spotify.com/download 1200 Years of Women Composers: A Free 78-Hour Music Playlist That Takes You From Medieval Times to Now Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Stream the Complete Works of Bach & Beethoven: 250 Free Hours of Music is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

I could watch Bill Murray in pretty much any film. And, for that matter, any animation too. So let’s queue up the brand new animated video from Blank on Blank, and watch Murray riff on the pros and cons of being rich & famous. Pro: You get to buy your mother a nice new car. Con: When her car breaks down, she doesn’t just get the car towed. She whips out your Amex card and buys the tow truck too. And so it goes. The interview from this Blank on Blank episode was recorded in 1988 by writer T.J. English, while writing a profile on Bill Murray for Irish America magazine. Find more Blank on Blank animations listed in the Relateds below. Related Content: Joni Mitchell Talks About Life as a Reluctant Star in a New Animated Interview New Animation: Hunter S. Thompson Talks with Studs Terkel About the Hell’s Angels & The Outlaw Life B.B. King Explains in an Animated Video Whether You Need to Endure Hardship to Play the Blues An Animated Bill Murray on the Advantages & Disadvantages of Fame is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.